I never thought that I would actually say that. Innovation in the realm of USB cables doesn't really seem possible. Sure, around the turn of the century there were some retractable Micro USB cables that had nice spring-loaded cylinders that would automatically wrap up the wire for easy storing. That was pretty nice. But look at what Plantronics did for their just-released Explorer 500 Bluetooth headset! Sure the Bluetooth headset is pretty nice. It's got HD voice, multilingual English, French or Spanish notifications, smartphone speech interface access, and noise/wind cancellation ...

Printers from yesteryear used parallel ports. Modems used serials ports -- which were available in either 9- or 25-pin varieties. High-speed devices like scanners and external drives used to connect via any number of SCSI connections. A company I used to work for even made products that let you daisy-chain two together via parallel port, and even came out with a drive that you could plug into either a parallel port or a 25-pin SCSI port. Even common devices like keyboards and mice connected through a PS/2 or other style connector. Put another way, there were just far too many kinds of ...

Especially if you're not an Apple user, it sure is easy to find fault with the company's Lightning connector: it's an unneeded proprietary design, it breaks compatibility with existing accessories, and cables supporting it can be damn expensive - we've heard all the complaints. But for whatever issues you may have, it's hard to deny the utility of Lightning's most compelling feature, the ability to attach the connector without regard for its orientation: it works just as well right side up as upside down. Back in December we heard about an effort to bring a cable that works in a similar ...

Tethering is one of those things that many of us got really excited about way back in the early days of cell phones. Here we had a little phone that we could connect to our laptop which would let us access the Internet or closed network (the office, university, etc.) without having to plug into a land-line to do so. Speeds weren't all that great, but being able to work from anywhere often trumped that. Today we have our choice of various high-speed technologies offered by any one of a handful of cellular carriers. We also have numerous ways to connect our laptops to our phones -- and we ...

By and large, smartphone manufacturers have embraced micro USB as the standard interface used for both charging, as well as interfacing with your computer. Sure, Apple's just gotta be Apple with its doesn't-play-nicely-with-others Lightning cable, and some tablets still use unusual proprietary connectors, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. While that means that you can use the same charger on your Lumia 1020 as on your BlackBerry Z10 or Samsung Galaxy Note 3, there hasn't been any hard rule in place mandating such compatibility. Going back years now, we've been hearing about ...

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has a somewhat unusual USB port on it. No, it's not reinventing one proprietary connector into another proprietary connector like Apple recently did with their "you can plug it in upside down" Lightning connector. Instead, Samsung opted to go with a standard port, albeit an ugly one: USB 3.0. Some are touting the inclusion of this new port as "revolutionary" or "a step in the right direction". To be frank, it's kind of silly. To find out why, let's take a look at the USB 3.0 standard and see what benefits it brings -- and why they aren't all that important on a ...

We were doing some speculating on last week's episode of the Pocketnow Live, and, as tends to happen, we got to talking about the future. Not the distant future, where embedded transceivers and wearable gadgets have replaced the smartphone, but some time before that. An era close to our own, with smartphones in nearly every pocket and more connectivity than ever, but with an important catch: this hypothetical world features connectivity without cables. Signal without strings. Phones without ports. The idea is amazing. So amazing I can't claim credit for it. Sure, other publications have ...

Apple is a master of making slow, steady iterations to its products, and when it comes to new devices or features, is famous for preferring to "do it better" than "do it first." This has resulted in the current fifth-generation iOS smartphone, the iPhone 4S, looking not all that dissimilar from its original-recipe progenitor, despite five years having passed between the two. Granted, the feature set has ballooned, and the industrial design has matured immensely, but the devices still appear not just cousins from the same family, but siblings who grew up in the same house. Many component ...